I've often wondered what the computing world would look like today if Apple had bought Be.

BeOS was a fantastic operating system, more advanced in many ways than other OSes of the era. I actually very briefly used it as my primary OS in the late 90s. But Be wasn't able to succeed as an independent company, and with the release of Mac OS X (which was heavily based on concepts and code from NeXT), Apple suddenly had a much better OS, and BeOS was relegated to the history books.

But somewhere out there is a parallel universe where BeOS, rather than OpenStep, became the basis for Apple's new OS. Would it have been able to compete with Windows? Without macOS's BSD underpinnings, would it have been as popular with developers as Mac OS X was? I wonder.